My Thoughts, Your Time

Moonlight and Sunlight

Summer sun and winter moon
I have forgotten who is who
And as we chase across the sky
The one to live, the one to die.

Blue rose to black; my love, shredded on thorns we both cast like die. I’m sorry. It’s all I have left to say. This wasn’t how I meant to begin this blog post at all – I wanted to enthuse about the golden and cream lace strung through the trees around the city, in this hazy autumnal light, with the lady Cathedral rising bronze through the blue sky…

But now I have tears again, for the first time in months. I swore you would never make me cry again. Not after each insult, and taunt, and nimbus-silence, and iron-tang words when I dared to go out with friends who happened to be male – how was I to know when you were playing the game?
I saw a tweet that fitted perfectly, crafted to the hashtag #WhyIStayed. D’you know, it formed the words that couldn’t leave my mouth.
“Because he kept saying Sorry.”
Well, that was the other You. It was why I left – because you told me to. More than once.
Then asked for me back, and I thought I had flipped.

I’m not even heartbroken anymore. We went beyond that, when there were moments I honestly thought I had lost my mind, because you wouldn’t admit to the truth. Denial is always the best policy, except in love, because it’s then that a bit of cold hard Truth wouldn’t have gone amiss. God knows, but you were honest enough when drunk.

And now I’m wondering if these tears will ever stop.

I don’t want to care. It isn’t like there’s much choice. No. No choice, because I froze you in ice, and there you can stay.
And I’ll give you Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, to remember me by. And you’ll hopefully hate me, because then it’s easier.

This year has been marked by the passing of our time, and I can barely comprehend how it’s already autumn. The water of the lake is transmuted brown to gold, all of that sifting silt, the swirling gypsy-scarves of oil again, leaked from bird shit and motorized boats of the Really Flush, and … Petrol rainbows, gone away into the drain.

All of the burnt colours that I adore. Though I’m a spring child by birth, this is my time of year for writing. After months spent in other countries, involved in online conflicts not of my business (and still, of my interest), I have a head full of plainness and blood. Heads torn from bodies, missiles launched into the air, skin carved from bones … And geopolitical, economical words and nuances and foreign affairs, wound around my own affair, until this mind that was once so colourful, became silent and still and cold with it all.

Now, I’m trying to get back towards that light, that shadow. But things will never be the same again. I am not the person I was this time last year – and had I known then what would happen, would it make any difference?
Doubt it.
Don’t doubt me, though. For all the barbs and the poison and the knotted scarves between us, I never once withdrew loyalty. That at least, I can stand by.

I wish I knew what you had wanted. If anything. It wasn’t like I had much to give; and it all began because I thought you might need a friend. I don’t know why, to this day, that thought occurred to me, and I sometimes wish I hadn’t acted upon it. The crossed wires are not only in my mind.

When I wake first thing in the morning, all I want to do is write. My mind will be full of dreams, and you, and colours … I’ll be fresh and ready, and full and alert, but work will call. And throughout the day, that grey Everyday, slow and sure, all the colours seep away from my mind, and my heart feels a little heavier for knowing that more time has passed, and I have not written a thing.
And by the time I arrive home – eventually – the thoughts have crossed the line into inertia again. Into indifference, and weariness. Thoughts of sleep. Thoughts of you. Thoughts of … where is this all going, this world that’s tearing itself apart, in a year that no one will forget in a hurry?

And I will be lucky if I have one hour to get anything down. Anything at all. So I listen to “Moonlight Sonata” now, and – walking home – I watch snippets from Simon Schama’s “Power of Art” docu-series (highly recommended for anyone who wants a resonant voiceover to pave the way between Turner, Monet, Bernini, Van Gogh etc), and favourite scenes from Pride and Prejudice (1995, of course – there is only one Mr Darcy, and he is best found at the Netherfield Ball – his expressions, twined about with Lizzie’s, are a priceless match of petals and thorns), and read colourful paragraphs from authors like Alice Hoffman, Jeffrey Eugenides and Peter S Beagle.

Anything to get some life back. To reinvigorate my mind, before attempting to put a few lines down. How has it come to this, when words were my own lace and links, strung through the pages of a book I was at first writing for myself, then about myself, in method-style … Not even by choice, it just happened this way. The turquoise ribbons flew in the wind, the sky turned to brass, the petrol rainbows flowed down with the rain and the blue rose was found in my palm. The teacher was somehow found in real life, even down to appearance, and it was unnerving. Perhaps I won’t finish it after all. The ending of that novel, in its first draft, is grim.

Well. I have recoloured my mind, at least. There is nothing more to say, or to do this evening, as it is already late. I’ll have another go at an article tomorrow evening, for there is much I would like to say now, about art. I’ve missed it, these past few months – not that it ever went away, but I chose not to look. My own folly. There’s only so much plain-speak and wire-words I can handle, before needing something that is refreshing as rain on tired eyelids.

I wish it had not ended this way. I wish for a lot of things – mainly, that you had actually talked to me, as I asked, rather than leave it to insinuations and insults. With depression already creeping up, light-tapping with claws on the writer’s block where my head lay, all I wanted was –

Not even what I wanted, really. More what you wanted; I would have tried. But you never seemed to have a clear idea, either. And I was always awake and aware of what lay behind you, and before. They never went away, the responsibilities. I wouldn’t have it so. We make of ourselves an image of the world, and find our own stories in art, and our own interpretations in the sky.

I was full of rage, white with it. Now, it’s the end of the day, and it’s a cobweb gently swinging in the still-warm breeze at my skylight, where stars are born to die.